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Undergraduate Research Symposium held at Penn State Lehigh Valley

Penn State Lehigh Valley students displayed their research to a panel of judges, fellow students, faculty, staff and community members on April 5 at the Lehigh Valley campus.

Image: Amber Campbell

Undergraduate Research Symposium held at Penn State Lehigh Valley

Daniel Omron

April 10, 2018

CENTER VALLEY, Pa. — More than 60 students, faculty and staff attended the Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 5 at Penn State Lehigh Valley. The Undergraduate Research Symposium allowed students to present their research before a panel of judges and fellow students, faculty, staff and the community. The judges awarded first-, second- and third-place honors to projects featured in the humanities, business, and social and behavioral sciences, STEM and information literacy.

Judges scored students based upon the quality of their exhibits in the following four areas: content, display, oral presentation and thoroughness.

Todd Retzlaff, associate professor of mathematics at Penn State Lehigh Valley, was the featured keynote speaker at the Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 5.

IMAGE: Jennifer Parker

Todd Retzlaff, associate professor of mathematics at Penn State Lehigh Valley, was the featured keynote speaker. Retzlaff presented “Random Walks, Reflection, and Intuition,” for students that focused on learning new concepts using models and describing them with intuition. Retzlaff also discussed many instances when intuition led people astray at times and they needed to resort to mathematics or economics.

“We do different things for different results,” said Retzlaff. “For example, if we randomly walk away from home to an unknown destination and try to go back, it is a large probability we will get lost. The more we familiarize ourselves with a certain route to go back home, the less probability there is to get lost. This is how we rely on mathematics and intuition to obtain results.”

Some of the winning students from the Undergraduate Research Symposium posed together on April 5 at the Lehigh Valley campus with three of the faculty mentors, Tracey Carbonetto (far left), Jennifer Parker (second from left), and Jacqueline McLaughlin (far right).

IMAGE: Jennifer Parker

The student research projects that won include:

Humanities, business, and social and behaviorial sciences

First Place: “Prescription Drug Use and Secondary Exposure among College Students: A Focus on Gender and Social Class," by Amanda Borges and Kirsten Mears. Faculty mentor: Jennifer Parker